3 Key Things Skeptics Will Say to Shame Your Kids for Being Christians

I haven’t blogged in the last couple of weeks because my family and I were on vacation. We went on a wonderful trip to the island of Grand Cayman! I successfully managed to avoid email while I was there, but that made for quite a backlog by the time I returned. As I started going through the emails to my blog address, I was struck by the nature of comment after comment left by atheists on various old blog posts while I was gone: one emotional attack after another and not a single discussion of evidence for/against the truth of Christianity.

I actually get such emails all the time and am very used to it. But seeing them all piled together made me realize how often the objective of skeptics is to shame Christians rather than to engage in fair-minded discussions about evidence—something highly ironic given how much skeptics talk in theory about how important evidence is.

Shaming can have an especially negative impact on kids, who are very susceptible to believing emotion-laden statements. But this, too, is something we can (and should) prepare them for. While shaming comes in all kinds of forms, I can roll 90 percent of skeptics’ comments into some version of three general claims.

Here is what your kids are most likely to hear…and what you can do about it.

1. “You’ve been indoctrinated.”

The Implied Shame Claim: You’re just parroting what your parents have drilled into your head throughout your childhood. You’ve been brainwashed and can’t even think for yourself. If you’re brave enough to look at [evidence/science/common sense] instead, you’ll see how crazy Christianity is.

I probably receive at least one blog comment each week about how I’m indoctrinating my kids simply by raising them in a Christian home. Skeptics love to say this. The problem is, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what indoctrination even means. As I explained in this post, indoctrination is “teaching someone to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions and beliefs.” In other words, indoctrination is a problem with how you teach someone something. It’s not inherently related to any particular belief system, though religion is one type of belief system where indoctrination is possible. Atheists can indoctrinate their kids as well.

So, unless a skeptic has been inside the homes of every Christian in America, seen how we are teaching our kids Christianity, and then had appropriate reason to conclude that we don’t collectively expose our kids to other ideas, it’s utterly meaningless to say that “Christians indoctrinate their kids.”

What Parents Can Do:

Make sure you’re not actually indoctrinating your kids. Make sure you are teaching them what other people believe. That doesn’t mean you should teach them that what everyone else believes is true (that’s not logically possible)—it simply means you’re appropriately comparing and contrasting other ideas, opinions, and beliefs.

Teach your kids the evidence for the truth of Christianity (you’re going to see a recurring theme on this bullet point). In that very process, you’ll be comparing and contrasting truth claims from various worldviews and your kids will know first-hand that you didn’t “indoctrinate” them.

2. “If you allow yourself to think critically, you’ll see there’s no reason to believe in God.”

The Implied Shame Claim: Don’t you want to be a critical thinker? Someone who is rational, reasonable, and uses their brain? If you have faith, you’re throwing all that out the door. You’re choosing to believe something in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

“Critical thinking” is a buzz phrase today. Technically speaking, critical thinking is the “objective analysis and evaluation of an issue to form a judgment.” The funny thing is, skeptics always assume that such thinking necessarily leads to their own conclusions. The logic goes like this:

Critical thinking means forming beliefs based on evidence.

There’s no evidence for God.

If you believe in God, you’re not thinking critically.

The problem with this logic is the second statement—the foregone conclusion that there’s no evidence for God. A more honest assessment would be that Christians and atheists disagree over what constitutes legitimate evidence for God. As much as many skeptics would like to make critical thinking their own domain based on this implied argument, the reality is that neither Christians nor atheists are willing to believe in something without evidence; Christians believe there is evidence for God. That’s why conversations about who’s thinking more critically than whom are absolutely pointless. There are Christians who think well and Christians who think poorly; atheists who think well and atheists who think poorly. This says nothing about the evidence itself.

What Parents Can Do:

Be intentional in talking to your kids about definitions. So many times, Christians and skeptics talk right past each other with conflicting meanings of the same words. In this case, discuss the words critical thinking and faith (skeptics incorrectly assert that faith means believing something in spite of evidence—see chapter 8 of my book for help with this conversation).

Discuss the implied argument of the three points listed above and explain that this is the logic behind skeptics’ claims that Christians don’t think critically. When you expose your kids to the thinking behind the shame claim, they won’t be fazed by it later.

Teach your kids the evidence for the truth of Christianity (yup, here it is again!). It’s one thing to show them the faulty logic (see the point above)—it’s another thing to teach them how to combat a faulty premise themselves.

3. “Christians are less intelligent than atheists. Studies show it.”

The Implied Shame Claim: You’re stupid if you’re a Christian and that’s not just my opinion—it’s been proven.

You may be surprised to hear that a number of studies have found a negative relationship between intelligence and religiousness—in other words, they suggest that the more intelligent a person is, the less likely they are to be religious. Many passionate atheists are well aware of these studies and use them as ammunition for their arguments that religion is for the poor, ignorant, or unintelligent.

Here’s the bottom line of what you should know: Over the last 80+ years, many studies have been done on the relationship between intelligence and religiousness. In 2013, researchers pulled together all the ones that quantified that relationship. Of the 63 studies they identified, roughly half showed no relationship at all. The other half showed at least some kind of negative relationship (the more intelligent you are, the less likely you are to be religious). That said, statistically speaking, it’s not very helpful to simply know there is “some kind” of relationship. You have to know how strong the relationship is to know if it matters. So researchers combined the results of all these individual studies to evaluate that question overall…and found the strength of relationship to be very weak. What do I mean by very weak? A -.17 or -.20 correlation is considered to be a trivial or negligible relationship by most statisticians. In other words, hardly worth mentioning. There is no reasonable basis for suggesting Christians are less intelligent than atheists according to this data.

What Parents Can Do:

Give your kids an appropriate framework for considering this kind of claim before you even discuss specific studies: Even if we could reliability measure which group is collectively smarter (we can’t), the answer wouldn’t tell us anything about the truth of Christianity. Intelligence doesn’t equate to always having the right answer. The important question we must constantly point our kids back to is, Which worldview is an accurate picture of reality? (Not which worldview theoretically has the smartest adherents.)

If your kids are teens, take the time to read my summary of these studies and findings and then discuss (links to my blog post and book above).

Teach your kids the evidence for the truth of Christianity (I told you this would keep coming up!). How else will they know how to set aside distracting claims like this one about intelligence and answer the key question, Which worldview is an accurate picture of reality?

So, you must have caught the recurring solution that combats all of these attempts at shaming: Teach your kids the evidence for the truth of Christianity.

Consider for a moment why that in particular is the antidote for almost any shaming attempt. Shame by definition is “a painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness or disgrace.” In other words, the root of shame is feeling inadequate.

In order for our kids to feel (more than) adequate when they encounter shaming attempts, they need to have the deep conviction that what they believe is really true. Only then will they be able to fully see these shame claims for what they are—shallow and baseless emotional attacks—and be able to say confidently with the apostle Paul, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).

Reader Interactions

Comments

That was a great blog post, Natasha! It was great because it was informative AND encouraging. So many times we are guilty of painting a dreary picture of the way things are in our culture – because it’s usually dreary – but your comebacks and “what to do’s” remind us the battle is not lost. Thanks.

thanks Natasha! I think it’s interesting because I am in a discussion with some atheists right now, and they are saying that Christianity is damaging to kids because it shames them. (Christianity teaches us we are sinners and are guilty and in need of forgiveness, etc.) So the atheist will shame the Christian kids while saying that it is Christianity that shames the kids.

Great post! It’s interesting, too, the shaming associated with the supposed low intellect of Christians. So many atheists pride themselves on being compassionate (more than average) towards those who are different from themselves, less able, less fortunate, less privileged, in different life circumstances, and so on. EXCEPT when it comes to the sort of mental prowess they believe they have developed and harnessed in the rejection of God. Then, suddenly, the “mentally inferior” are to be mocked, scorned, demonized, and hated. There is then no real pity or empathy, only self-righteousness and smug superiority. When one sees this happening, it rather puts the lie to the other pretenses of compassion. How much better it would be if we could all admit that self-righteousness is part of human nature, not the exclusive domain of one belief system or the other. If and when our belief system is dominated by a couple of Great Virtues by which we choose to label ourselves (say, the ultimate advocates for Love or Reason, to use some popular examples), we become hardened and blind to the times that we do not in fact regularly show such virtues to our neighbor.

Well-written and extremely important. This is the type of material that will give confidence to parents and kids to respond to secular challenges rather than run from them.

It is ironic that atheists and skeptics falsely accuse Christians of believing without evidence, when many of them accept the “multiverse” theory without evidence, and without any possibility of adducing evidence for or against the theory.

This comment might be long. This issue is emotionally moving. Disclosures, I am an athiest though I label myself a simple romantic. I am married and have three children. I am an artist working with youth and I was a Christian for four decades. I slowly walked away from religion after serving in war as a US Marine.
The experience of war did not break my religion. The experience gave strength to my respect for the sanity of life through living an authentic, warm, fulfilling life. This warm outlook finally crowded then removed religion.
When I read articles like yours I feel a sense of sadness. My sorrow is not for the children who become adults receiving comfort from religion. My sorrow is reserved for the adults who can’t authentically live because of a religious upbringing. I can list many examples but I will address only one: homosexuals. Imagine a life without the kiss of a true love, without a slow romantic dance, or a life without holding hands during a sad movie. I would not wish this fate upon anyone.

[…] Know anything about deconversion? For more on this topic check out the amazing blog Christian Mom Thoughts. It has wonderful posts about discussing these intellectual arguments with your kids, like this one: 3 Key Things Skeptics Will Say to Shame Your Kids for Being Christians. […]